Ain't no doubt I could win pitchin' relief every day. Name off one of you guys can hit three deliveries like I throw, overhand, sidearm and underhand.

If I'd be five inches off center, why, that'd still be a strike, but he'd give me hell. Today I can lay a cigaret paper down and pitch across it seven times out of eight. Never been sore but once down in Mexico in 1937. Like Joe Louis, only one arm like this comes along in fifty years.

As told to Red Smith, who wrote, "His first manager, Bill Blakewell, taught him control, making him warm up with a baseball as his target instead of a plate."